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iTunes Genius, Or Salesperson In Your Pocket?

Friday, September 12th, 2008 by rosenz

   When Steve Jobs announced that the big new feature in iTunes 08 was Genius, a music recommendation service, I, and many others, said: “Huh.”
    First of all, this sort of technology has been around for a long long time. It was years (6, 8?) ago that I first used Amazon’s feature to find similar artists based on what people bought. I used that to discover new artists, in fact. More recently, Pandora has introduced some very sophisticated music matching techniques that suggest new music based on the music itself. I’ve also used sites like AllMusic.com to find out which artists I may like.
    But Genius fails in a way that Apple is usually very good at — it really feels like it is selling you something. I feel that it is pushing me to buy music, not suggesting music I may like.
    It reminds me of my high school job, which was working at a record store. Now I worked at a cool record store. We didn’t go out onto the floor and bother people by trying to sell them more records. (By the way, by “records” I do mean vinyl). But at other stores you’d get some kid trying to suggest something: “Have you heard the latest Smithereens album?”
    Genius feels like that. I feel like telling it: “Don’t bother me, kid, I know what I want.”
    And what is with the name? A “genius” is how you would describe someone who takes one song and then suggests others? That’s not a “genius” — that’s just Jack Black in High Fidelity.
    I’d at least expect it to be smarter than Amazon or Pandora, but most of the suggestions I got were just for other songs by the same artist. And it doesn’t even seem to know that Anna Waronker was in That Dog — there are no suggestions between them.
    And what happens if I select a Beatles song? I can’t find anything! That’s weird on so many levels.
    And it has nothing to do with my Beatles songs coming from CD instead of the iTunes store — most of my music is that way. It may have to do with The Beatles not being sold on iTunes, but as a music lover I don’t really care about Apple’s legal issues.
    Anyway, I’m sure that Genius will help Apple sell more music. It can’t hurt, right? I’m sure that was part of their reasoning.
    But now that I’m not reviewing it, I’m turning it off.

Posted in Blog Posts, frontpage | 4 Comments »

MacMost Now 132: Spore For Mac

Thursday, September 11th, 2008 by rosenz

   Gary Rosenzweig takes a look at Spore, the new game from Will Wright and Electronic Arts. Spore is a game that takes you from a single-celled organism to galactic domination.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    Hi! This is Gary. Well, Spore is finally here and it’s on the Mac. Let’s take a look in this episode of MacMost Now.
    Well, Spore is a long anticipated game from Will Wright, the creator or SimCity and the Sims. And this is the successor to those games. This is the all-in-one game where you take a single-celled organism all the way through civilization up to colonizing the stars. It’s really five games in one. Let’s go and take a look.
    Well, the basic idea is you play a simple life form and make choices to help it evolve. In this first stage here, you float around in a primordial ooze and eat and evolve. This plays like a simple arcade game and doesn’t last for too long. But it is visually rich and it can be challenging at times. It’s really just a quick introduction to how you use the creature creator and how you move around.
    The second stage moves your creation onto land. This part plays like a 3D platform game. You run around the landscape and eat plants or other animals. You can make friends or just kill anything that gets in your way.
    The third stage puts you in charge of a town of your creatures. At this point you’re biological evolution is over and you concentrate on building on and expanding your tribe’s influence. This plays a little bit like the original WarCraft game.
    In the fourth stage you’re in charge of an entire modern city. You also grow to take over other cities by force or influence and, eventually, the goal is to rule the entire planet. This part’s a little bit like the real time strategy games, such as Age of Empires or Rise of Nations.
    The fifth and final part of Spore puts you in outer space. You create a space ship and then travel between the stars looking for a planet to colonize, invade, or to trade with.
    At the very heart of Spore is the creature creator. At the beginning you use this to modify your single-celled life form. Then you continue to use it to modify your land creature in the next stage. You also use this interface to create outfits for your creatures, design the buildings in your city, the vehicles, the sea ships, the airplanes, and eventually, even the space ships.
    The game’s two best assets are the interface and the graphics. The game looks spectacular. Every little piece of it is a work of art; every creature you create, the landscapes, the planets in outer space, everything. And the interface is extremely intuitive, considering that the game is very complex.
    The game has a lot of hidden depth, as well. For instance, in the fourth part when you’re actually controlling your city and taking over the planet, you can modify your nation’s national anthem. There’s a little anthem composer interface in there that’s extremely easy to use to create a piece of music.
    Now, some problems with the game are that it may be too easy for hardcore gamers. I was able to easily get through all the levels without any difficulty at the normal setting. Now, for casual gamers, it might be a little bit too complex. And there’s this goal driven thing in the game where every level you’re driven to accomplish the next goal and some parts of the game seem to tell you to stop and smell the roses, and other parts of the game are telling you to hurry up and get to the next part.
    And there are a lot more details on this game that I’m not even going to get into here. Like, for instance, the creatures that you create are uploaded to a central server and may actually make appearances in other players’ games.
    As a Mac game, I was really impressed by the stability. The game only crashed once in about ten hours of game play. That’s really something for a 1.0 version of a game that hasn’t been patched yet. And I was even able to switch to Windowed mode and check my email and surf the web while playing my game in another window without any problem.
    So if you’re into real time strategy or you want to see what all the hype is about about the most anticipated game in years, go and check out Spore.
    Until next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Posted in MacMost Now, Video Podcast, frontpage | No Comments »

MacMost Now 131: New iPod Nano, Touch, Classic and iTunes 8

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 by rosenz

   Gary Rosenzweig takes a look at today’s announcements by Steve Jobs of a new iPod Nano, iPod Touch and iPod Classic. Also, new iTunes 8 and iPhone software update 2.1.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    Hi this is Gary Rosenzweig bringing you a rundown of today’s apple announcements in this episode of mac most now.
    Steve jobs took the stage this morning and made some announcements of some new products. First of witch was itunes version 8 which will be a free update of itunes. First thing that he mentioned is that it is going to have high definition TV episodes to download for a buck more then standard episodes. In addition NBC is going to return to iTunes now all the NBC shows including the ones they produced even if they weren’t shown on an NBC station were removed from iTunes due to disputes between pricing and other things, but all of these shows are going to be coming back soon. In addition to that Jobs talked a lot today about a new feature called genius. What genius does is it makes suggestions about music and artists that you may like based on music that you currently selected, music in your playlist. And it does the same thing for music and movies as well. In addition to being in iTunes 8 it will be available on some of the ipod products, that we are going to talk about next.
    So there are updates to three parts of the ipod line and the first part is the ipod classic. The descendant of the original ipod. Now the ipod classic will go to a single model and it will be available in 120 gigabytes. For $249. But it is going to have a thin form factor of one of the two previous ipods. Now as expected the ipdo nano is getting a major update. It is getting an entire new look. It is going to be thin, and it is going to be tall. It’s going to have the same exact screen that the current one has, but in a different orientation. So what’s new in it is it’s going to be the accelerometer, the same ones that is in the iPhone. So it can detect when it’s turned on it’s side or when it’s turned upright. and it can adjust when the screen looks like according to that video will be shown in the wide format. The prices are going to be $149 for an 8 gigabyte version and $199 for a 16 gigabyte version.
    The accelerometers will be used for more then just orientation, for example there will be a shake to shuffle feature where you can actually shake your ipod nano and it will skip to the next song.
    And also the iPod touch is getting a makeover it’s going to have a mirror design to match that of the iPhone. In addition it’s also going to add volume control on the side and a speaker. There will also be built in functionality for Nike Plus. Which basically puts a sensor in your shoe and you can get all sorts of statistics about your running. In addition to that the new prices are going to be set at $229 for an 8 gig version $299 for a 16 gig version and $399 for a whooping 32 gigabytes of storage space.
    What’s even more interesting is there is even more talk about games at this event. There are three game demos all using the iPod touch. And a new commercial for the iPod touch that basically shows it off as a gaming devise so it looks like once and for all Apple is really competing with the Nintendo DS and the PlayStation Portable in the portable games space.
    Now Jobs also announced iPhone software update 2.1. This is going to get us fewer crashes, better battery life, and fewer dropped calls, and also will speed up the backup procedure which happens just about every time you syhc your iphone.
    Jobs also mentioned some interesting accessories for all of the different ipods. One was a microphone for the iPod nano, that will allow voice recording. Which should make it a really useful devise for especially students who could use it to record lectures and such.
    It looks like a lot of these new devices will be shipping by the end of the week or by this weekend. Including the software updates. So check them out and until next time this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

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MacMost Now 130: Blurring An Area In iMovie 08

Monday, September 8th, 2008 by rosenz

   Gary Rosenzweig attempts to using iMovie 08 to blur out an area in a video. You can use this to blur a license plate, face or something else you want to remove.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. Today let’s do the impossible and add a video blur in iMovie 08.
    Now iMovie 08 is a bit of a disappointment to most people and I hated it when it first came out. But I’ve grown to love it over the months and I use it to edit every episode of MacMost Now. And it still frustrates me that there are a few things I can’t really do that I could do in previous versions of iMovie and can do in other editing programs like Final Cut. So when I’d see one of these I’d really want to figure out if there was a way to do it all. One of these is adding a video blur. This is say, you’ve got a picture of a license plate or somebody’s email or even somebody in your video that you want to blur out, you don’t want them to be there but you don’t want to have to re-shoot the entire thing. You just want to create a blurry area in your video. In more advanced editors there’s functions to be able to do this and even in something like QuickTime Pro there’s some tricks to be able to superimpose images on top of your video to do this as well. In iMovie 08 it seems to be very tricky, if not impossible. So I set myself a goal of having to figure out a way to do this and I did come up with a solution. It’s not pretty but it does work and it doesn’t require you to use any other video editors. All it needs is iMovie 08 and some image editor, like Photo Shop, Fireworks, or anything that you’ve got. Let’s go and take a look step by step of how to create a video blur in iMovie 08.
    So here in iMovie I’ve got a simple movie here. There’s simply one thing here in the library and it’s a video of me giving a presentation. What I’ve done in the presentation is I wrote my email address up at the top here and I don’t want that to appear in the video so I’m going to fade that out, blur it. So I drag it into my iMovie project here at the top. Notice that the camera is completely still, on a tripod, so that’s great because this email address remains in the exact same area the entire time. So what I need to do is I need to take a copy of this and it doesn’t really matter what frame of the video I take because the email address is always going to be in the same spot. But what I’m going to do is take a screen shot as large as possible so I’m going to go ahead and enlarge this iMovie window here and I’m going to do command shift three, which is my keyboard shortcut for a standard Mac screenshot and I’m going to grab the area. You don’t have to be perfect, just within a pixel or two. And there you go. I’ve grabbed the area so now I have a picture that I can paste into a graphics program. I’m going to use Photoshop because it’s very popular. You can use Fireworks or Graphic Converter or anything else that you have because we need to create a blur effect here so I’m going to go ahead and create a new document and it will remember that I’ve got something on the clipboard and allow me to paste it in there. Great. So now I’ve got this in a Photoshop document. I’m going to go ahead and create an oval around the area I want to blur and then apply a filter. Let’s do a calcium blur and okay. So now we’ve blurred that area out. That’s great. So now what we want to do is we only want to have that area so I’m going to invert the selection. Select and inverse and then hit delete. So now we’ve gotten rid of everything, we’ve made everything else transparent except for this blurry area. I’m going to go ahead and save this is as a, we’ll call it ‘blur’ and we’ll do it as a png is a really good format for this. So blur.png. And we’ll just choose the regular options and we’ll save it out. So now we’ve got blur.png.
    So now back in iMovie we go to our directory where we’ve got the original screenshot and there’s the blur as well. Now if we click on the blur you can drag that right into iMovie and if you drag it after the clip it will actually create a still image for about four seconds in your movie. But if you drag it right over the video, you can actually drop it on top of the video and it will superimpose this image on top of what’s there. Release. And there we go. We actually have this image superimposed on top which this is the only part of it, the rest of it is transparent so as I scroll back and forth I can see the rest of the video plays normally and this part now has the static area there. So now, that’s all good. Except for one thing. If I go to the beginning of the video you can see that the graphic fades in and the same thing at the end, it fades out meaning at the very beginning and very end you can read my email address. Now that’s no good so we have to go and solve this problem. As you would expect there is a way to adjust the fade in and fade out if you right click or control click on the movie and choose Project Properties you get a bunch of properties, including the Title Fade Duration and you can set that to be longer or shorter. The only problem is you can only go to a quarter of a second and that’s still too long, we need it down to zero and there’s no way to actually get it down to zero. So there’s only one thing for us to do, trying all other options, we’ve got to actually export this movie and once it’s exported we’ve got to go in and re-import it in. This is a big pain but it’s the only way to get it done. So we’re going to export this as temp, as a media movie — actually let’s do it as large so we have it as full size for the movie that we’re making. And once we have this we’ll be able to re-import it and trim the front and back of the video.
    So now we have our new movie so we want to use file import movies in iMovie 08 and click on temp and it will bring in this copy basically of the original movie and it will go ahead and put it in our library. So go ahead and select the clip and the blur effect, there we go. And we’ll go ahead and take the second copy of it, bring it in here and now we’ve got the blur effect already there and we’ve also got of course you see we have that fade in and the fade out at the beginning and end. So we select the clip, we do Trim and we’re able to go ahead and trim just a little bit off the beginning and a little bit off the end. Done. And now we get rid of that transition there at the beginning and end and there’s no way to read the email address. Now we can go ahead and add more things to this movie, export it and we’ve completely, successfully blurred out the element that we wanted to blur out.
    So as you can see here the solution’s a bit convoluted having to export your movie halfway through and re-import it in. But it does work. So if you have the occasional need for something like this and you don’t want to invest in a more advanced video editor this is a solution for you. Hopefully in a future version of iMovie we might get some more advanced functionality or at least Apple will once again let third party developers create plug ins as you could for earlier versions of iMovie.
    Until next time this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

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Spore “Origins” for iPhone Will Come Out Later This Month

Monday, September 8th, 2008 by rosenz

   So two bits of Spore news. The first is that the iPhone version will not be released until later this month. All reports previously had mentioned that it would be out the same day as the full PC/Mac game.
    The second is that the game isn’t “Spore” but “Spore Origins.” It appears to be similar to the first part of the full PC/Mac game where you evolve a single organism floating around in a primordial ooze.
    We’ve got to point out how we predicted this back in March in the post Why We Won’t Really See Spore on the iPhone. The second bit of news, in the same press release by EA, is that the game will use the iPhone-specific controls: the motion sensor, and pinching and pulling on the multi-touch screen. This should make for a unique experience on the iPhone and iPod Touch. There are supposed to be 2 modes and 35 levels — we’ll see what that means when the game comes out.
    Meanwhile, Spore Origins has been released for the iPod Video, Classic and iPod Nano third-generation.
    Electronic Arts also announced several other titles for the iPhone in the same press release, but no specific release dates: Yahtzee Adventures, EA Mini Golf, Lemonade Tycoon, Mahjong, Monopoly: Here & Now The World Edition, SimCity, Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 09, Need for Speed Undercover, and The Sims 3. SimCity, in particular could be a powerful game on the iPhone.
    Update: Spore Origins is out and costs $9.99 at the iTunes App Store. It is basically just the first part of Spore, where you float around in the primordial ooze.

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Comcast’s Bandwidth Limit Will Limit Innovation

Friday, September 5th, 2008 by rosenz

   Next month Comcast cable modem customers will have to start watching their bandwidth. The large Internet provider has announced that they will limit users to 250GB per month of data transfer. Previously, users have had unlimited data transfer, although there are many reports of heavy users being kicked off the service when they hit an invisible limit.
    Now 250GB is a lot of data. If you downloaded one HD movie per day, at 5GB per movie, it would add up to 150GB. If you streamed live video at .5MB per second for two hours each day, it would be about 216GB. If you downloaded a new version of your entire operating system every day, it would be about 180GB.
    So 250GB is hard to hit. Now. For most people. But soon it will be easier. And we want it to be easier. People are creating more and more content — video content — for online distribution. It is not hard to subscribe to 10, 20 or even 50 video podcasts, updating each day or week, all with hundreds of MB or even GB in file size.
    And the idea from the creator’s side is to get viewers. People are trying all sorts of different shows: news programs, comedy, vlogs, commentary, artistic, etc. This is a renaissance period for video, where all it takes is an idea, talent and hard work to make something, not a million dollar budget.
    But if a large portion of the Internet audience suddenly starts watching their bandwidth, counting each byte for fear of losing their Internet connection, then they will stop download video because it looks interesting. They will get more picky, sticking with what they know and avoiding new things.
    And this won’t just stay with Comcast. Since they took the first step, expect others to follow. Other cable providers will look at this as a way to set bandwidth limits without causing a fuss, because Comcast did it first. And competing services like DSL will do the same, claiming that they need to match Comcast’s service terms to remain competitive.
    And don’t forget that Internet video is the primary reason, I’m sure, for this bandwidth cap. Or at least it will be the primary victim. And what is Comcast’s primary business? Video. So this is an anti-competitive move. There is no bandwidth limit on Comcast’s video services, only on the Internet, which competes with Comcast’s cable channels.
    So we might be seeing the beginning of the end here. The end to innovation and creativity in Internet video. Soon it may require big budgets again, at least in marketing, to get your video noticed by the bandwidth-strangled public. Noticed enough that they are willing to spend some of their precious byte allotment to risk seeing if your show is worthwhile.

Posted in Blog Posts, frontpage | 1 Comment »

MacMost Now 129: Shorter URLs and Hiding Your Email Address

Thursday, September 4th, 2008 by rosenz

   Gary Rosenzweig takes a look at two Web services. The first, http://tinyurl.com, will take a long Web address and shorten it to make it easier to send in email. The second, http://tinymail.me, will hide your email address.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. Today I am going to show you how to shorten URL’s for e-mails, and even how to shorten your e-mail address.
    So you’ve probably been in the situation before: You go to a webpage that’s really cool and want to send it to a friend so you copy and paste the address of the web page into an email and send it to your friend. But you get an e-mail back from them saying “Hey, it didn’t work when I went to the web page, I got an error message.” What’s probably happening is that your URL, or address of the web page was so long that their e-mail program cut it into two lines and then when they clicked on it, it only gave them the first line in their web browser. So what you need to do in situations like this is to shorten the URL. Now you can do this with any URL no matter how long it is. Let’s take a look at an example.
    So here I am at google maps. And I want to show my friends an address. So, I go and I find exactly where I want. And then I want to send it to them so I click on link and I get this little paste link in email or IM thing here. I copy it, now you can see here this URL that I highlighted, this is huge! It’s massive so I paste it in my browser to see how long it is up here. Then what I want to do is I want to send this to them in e-mail. So normally I would open my normal e-mail program and I would paste this in there. But it may wrap on them and not give them a valid link. So I look at it a better way to do it. I’m going to copy it and then go to another website called tiny URL. And when you go to tiny URL.com it gives you a little prompt here at the beginning to enter a long URL so I paste that URL in there and that entire thing’s in there and I say make tiny URL. And, it tells me, hey this was the original URL, you can see how long it was; this is the new one. Now if I copy and paste this one into the web browser at the top I can see I actually get redirected to exactly what it was I was looking at before. So this is great so now I go ahead and create an e-mail and paste in this really tiny path to the web page. I can do this with any URL anywhere on the internet. Now this can be done even easier if your using firefox, there is several different plugins for firefox that will allow you to quickly create a tiny URL from the current page your on. There are also lots of other competitors to tiny URL.com so you may want to check them out and maybe find one that you like better. So here’s another website that’s similar, its called tinymail dot m e. And at this website, instead of doing URLS you can do e-mail addresses. And you may have a long e-mail address but that’s not the point here. The point here is to protect your e-mail address. Say you want to post your email address on a web page but your afraid that spammers are just going to read the web page and put your email address in a spam list. well you can enter your email address out here and click on protect it. And then what you’ll get is you’ll get a link like that or even just something to really quickly embed this into a web page. if you go to this short tinymail.me link, this is what you get. You actually get something called a captcha which is one of those things where you have to type in the word you see. This is potentially made hard for computers to be able to interpret so spammers can’t go out and grab all sorts of information from web forms like this. So when somebody goes to you e-mail you they get this thing, they enter in the words they see there, and then are redirected to sending you an email, just like they would normally do with a normal e-mail address inside of a post or a web page. Thanks to the captain for the tinymail.me tip. Til next time this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Posted in MacMost Now, Video Podcast, frontpage | 1 Comment »

Apple Clone Wars

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 by rosenz

   A lot of tech journalists this week are talking about computer maker Psystar’s counter lawsuit against Apple. Psystar has been making and selling Mac clones for a few months now. They put together standard PC parts and install Mac OS X on it. The only problem being that Apple doesn’t allow Mac OS X to be installed on non-Mac computers, according to the license.
    So it was only a matter of time before Apple sued to stop Psystar. What’s interesting is that Psystar is fighting back by claiming that Apple has created an illegal monopoly by insisting that Mac OS X only gets to run on Apple-made hardware.
    So this brings up the question: Why doesn’t Apple like Psystar and other manufacturers install OS X on their machines? After all, it is a sale for Apple.
    Apple did do this for a while in the 90s. And it didn’t help Apple much at all. Those clones were a little cheaper, but quality was an issue. Steve Jobs put a stop to it as soon as he returned to Apple.
    I think quality is again the issue. OS X has an advantage over Windows. Windows needs to know how to run on a lot of different hardware configurations: processors, video cards, sound cards, motherboards, buses, etc. But OS X only needs to run using a very finite set of these things. This allows Apple to spend less time getting OS X to work on every possible configuration, and more time getting it to work well on the configurations that they know and control.
    I think the plan is to make sure that OS X is a good experience for users, wherever OS X runs. ANd if it is allowed to run on non-Apple hardware, then Apple looses control over that experience.
    I think the guys at Apple are smart and have run the numbers. They see they can make a little more by selling OS X to other manufacturers, but that they will loose customer satisfaction in the long run.
    I don’t see a monopoly here, I see the opposite. You can choose between Windows, OS X and Linux. The first is a general operating system not tied to hardware. The second is an OS that is built for specific hardware. The third is an open source solution that can be adapted to fit a need. The market has produced three different operating systems that are distinctly different, and yet all allow you to person the same basic tasks on a personal computer.

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MacMost Now 128: iPhone Games-Scrabble, Galcon, Aurora Feint

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 by rosenz

   Gary Rosenzweig looks at three iPhone Game Apps available at the iTunes App Store. Scrabble is the official version of the classic board game. Galcon is a strategy game played like an arcade game. Aurora Feint is an interesting adventure and puzzle game. You can also play free iPhone games at MacMost.com.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now.
    Today let’s take a look at three games I like for the iPhone. So it’s been less than two months since the release of the iPhone Apps store and there’s already a ton of games for you to purchase and some for free. Let’s take a look at three of them.
    The first is a no brainer for me,it’s Scrabble. It’s an official version of Scrabble and I love this game. I love it as a computer game, I’ve owned versions for the PC, the Mac and even for the iPod. So let’s take a look at the iPhone version of Scrabble.
    So you’ve got various options, you can do a quick play or a custom play where you can set the difficulty with various options and you can even set it to play against a real opponent rather than a computer opponent.
    When you do the normal version of the game you go ahead and you start and you get your tiles and then you get to go ahead and place them on the board. Now the board’s pretty small on the iPhone so what it does is it zooms in as you’re placing tiles. So for instance here we want to go ahead and place axe in the middle of the board, it will zoom in like that. Then it calculates your tally. It’ll tell you if your word’s invalid and then the computer will move and then it’s your turn again.
    You get to do all the normal stuff like trading letters and things like that and you get to watch your score here at the top of the screen. This game is very similar to the computer versions of Scrabble and it plays very well.
    One of the complaints I’ve got is that the difficulties are too far apart. The normal level is too easy for me, and the hard level’s impossible as the computer guesses words you’ve never even heard of before. So there needs to be more tiers in there. Besides that it’s a pretty good game, not only for Scrabble players, but it’ll help you improve your game. It will set you back the full ten dollars though, so it might just be for Scrabble lovers.
    So next here’s a game from an independent developer. It’s good to see that independent developers are doing will with iPhone apps, just as well as the large publishers. This game is called Galcon and it’s basically a strategic conquest type of game in a space setting. But it’s more than that because it’s played at an arcade pace. Let me show you.
    So there’s many different levels of game play and game variations. But the basic level is classic, it looks like this. You get a bunch of different planets. You’re the green one over here and then there’s the orange enemy over here. And what you do is when you start you send your ships to other planets by simply tapping and dragging. When you do that you take over the planet. The larger the planet, the quicker you’re going to be able to produce ships and your goal of course is to eliminate the other guy completely. You can do this by sending your ships to his planet and taking it over. Once you’ve done it you’ve won.
    So, Galcon is a great twist on a strategy game, played in real time. It’s simple enough that it’s quick and easy to play, but with the higher difficulty levels it can be quite challenging and there’s plenty of game variation as well. It’s also ten dollars from the iPhone Apps store.
    Another game that’s quite interesting by an independent developer is called Aurora Feint. Now this is kind of an adventure game, role playing game, but with a lot of puzzle game elements to it as well, and there’s an online portion.
    Let’s take a look.
    So, the main part of Aurora Feint includes this big map and from the map you can go to several different places. You can go to for instance, the mine and the mine has the main game in it, where you can actually go ahead and earn points by playing this simple block moving game. What you need to do here is basically move the blocks in such a way so that it lines up three in a row like so and you continue to go ahead and do this to earn points here and then you also play the same game to be able to put together skill sets for yourself.
    It’s a fairly complex game and I haven’t gotten too much into it, there’s a lot to see here. But once you’re done with the basic mine, you can go right back to the map and you can also go ahead and look at other statistics about your character, that you’ve created in the game.
    It’s actually tough to explain this game in a short review, so you’re gonna have to try it yourself. Now trying it yourself is easy because the game is completely free. Just choose it from the iPhone Apps store and download it and you don’t have to pay a penny, and it looks like the developer has a lot more in store because this game is called “The Beginning”, meaning that there are going to be more episodes and there’s going to be much more of an online component, playing against other people. So look for a lot of great things from this developer. and try out Aurora Feint.
    Of course, I should mention that you can also play more iPhone games by using the Safari Web Browser and plugging into MacMost.com/iPhone games.
    Until next time, it’s Gary Rosenweig with MacMost Now.

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MacMost Now 127: Upload From iPhoto to Flickr and FaceBook

Friday, August 29th, 2008 by rosenz

   Gary Rosenzweig looks at two extensions for iPhoto that will allow you to upload your photos directly from iPhoto to Flickr and FaceBook.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. Today I’m going to show you two different extensions to iPhoto that will make it easier for you to get your photos up to the internet. iPhoto is a great program for editing and managing your photos, but it doesn’t really make it any easier for you to get your photos up to a website. It does do this through mobileme, but if you don’t want to pay the extra money for mobileme, or you want to actually put it on a website where people can share information about photos, then there is really nothing in iPhoto for you. You have to export your photos from iPhoto and then do a separate upload procedure. However, there are two extensions for iPhoto that make this easier. One of them is for Flicker, and the other is for Facebook. Let’s take a look at them. Alright, so here we are inside of iPhoto, and I have some pictures that I took yesterday at the DNC here in Denver, walking around town. So I can select one or all of these photos, and then, I don’t go to the “share” menu, which you would think it would be the place to go, but instead I go to file, export. And this is where the plugins allow you to do different things with your photos. So I’ve got two new plugins here, one is FFExporter, and FFExporter then comes up with this dialog here (if I’m not logged in to flicker at the time, I can click here to login, it will take me to a webpage, using Safari or Firefox, and I will then log in and then return to this page). Once I do that, it knows who I am, as you can see, and even lists some of the photo sets that I’ve got in Flicker. I can then go ahead and choose some things to do about this photo set that I’m going to upload, so I can, say, I want anybody to be able to see this, I can restrict the photo size, I can change the safety level if I want, I can even change the type of content. And then I can go ahead and, when I’m done with that, hit export and what will happen is, it will upload all the photos that I’ve selected to my Flicker account, and it’s as easy as that. You can get this free Flicker exporter at “dustin.li”. Now, I guess you can say this is beta software, because its version 0.41, but it seems to work fine. The next step we’ve got a way to export your iPhoto photos into Facebook. Of course, you need a Facebook account for this, and you do the same thing, just select your photos, and then you ahead and do File, Export, but this time you select Facebook, and you go ahead and log in, and I’ve done the same thing here, I’ve logged in, and it goes to a website, and for Facebook, and then you go ahead and do your login, and then it knows you’re logged in back here at iPhoto. Then you can do a bunch of interesting things. You can choose which album you want to upload to, so you can go ahead and choose an album on Facebook, or you can create a new one right here inside the exporter. Then you can select your photos, and you can select them and add a caption right here. So the FreeFlicker exporter, that was actually taking your title tags from iPhoto, so you want to set them up in advance, but this here won’t take those but it will allow you to create the captions right here for each individual one. So you can create a little longer description than you normally would put in a title. Another cool thing that you can do is you can go ahead and you can tag people in a photo. All you need to do is click on the photo in any area, like that, and it will create this tag area, and you can go ahead and select from your friends or type in any name as a tag for the person in the photo. So that’s pretty cool, and then we’ll go ahead and upload all of these photos and they’ll appear in Facebook. Now, one thing that’s not cool about this is that then you have to go into Facebook and approve these photos, because they won’t automatically be available to everyone. Get this Facebook iPhoto plug-in for free by going to developers.facebook.com/iphoto. I love these types of plugins because they make it so easy to share photos with others, and I really whish there were more for more of the photo sharing services. Until next time, this is Gary Rozenzweig with MacMost Now.

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